NSF Award
0848913
This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II research project will further validate a groundbreaking wireless semiconductor platform that enables disposable, body-worn, physiological monitoring wireless sensors (wireless disposables) for a wide range of applications in healthcare and other industries. The company's chips are combined with today's body sensors such as electrocardiogram (ECG), Saturation of Peripheral Oxygen (SpO2), and blood pressure, to produce wireless disposables for continuous monitoring. For mass deployment, wireless disposables must displace today's wired sensors, therefore must have equally low cost, similar reliability, and days of operating life for a single use. Conventional radios are too unreliable, too power hungry and cause high interference to meet this challenge. The company is creating a single chip solution by combining radio with sensor functions providing a gain of 50X over conventional radio based solutions in terms of low power, low cost and wire-like reliability. <br/><br/><br/>Eliminating the wires connecting a person's body to a patient monitor long held as impossible to replace could be possible with the proposed solution. Healthcare markets, the initial focus of the company (dominated by hospital use), represent more than a $2B market in disposables. The wireless disposables will have a broad global impact by contributing to cost effective, high quality care in hospitals and other care settings. In hospitals, wireless disposables can eliminate reusable monitoring wires, products which have been demonstrated to carry drug resistant pathogens in up to 75% of cases. Wireless disposables are also aligned with a future vision of highly automated institutions that support a more natural workflow. Outside the hospital, wireless disposables allow remote and mobile monitoring of people with chronic diseases, enabling early interventions, an important goal in maintaining health and lowering costs. Wireless disposables will help solve the global healthcare crisis, with US costs over $1.5 trillion and rising rapidly as 78 million baby boomers near retirement.
